As a Private School in Brooklyn Raises Its Profile, Questions of Identity Arise

“We’re becoming more of a New York City school located in Brooklyn than a Brooklyn school,” said Bruce L. Dennis, head of school at the Packer Collegiate Institute.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The entrance of the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights feels like a well-worn living room, with faded and thinning green carpets, dark wooden benches from a different era and battered backpacks bulging with textbooks strewed about the hallway.

Up the stairs there are three renovated, $500,000 science labs for the upper school and a new one for the lower school. Two more labs for the high school will be completed this summer. There is a sprawling, light-filled art studio, renovated in 2008; an expanded admissions office; and a 10-person information technology department, which includes three people who focus solely on fixing broken laptops.

Think of Packer as having two personalities: intimate, cozy and warm, with its Brooklyn roots, and ever-expanding and state-of-the-art, with facilities that reflect increasing competition among private schools, including those in Brooklyn.

“We’re becoming more of a New York City school located in Brooklyn than a Brooklyn school,” said Bruce L. Dennis, Packer’s head of school.

Increasing demand for private school seats, combined with millions of dollars of program upgrades, has raised Packer’s profile, and in the process made it competitive with some of the city’s best-known private schools. But it has also forced it to wrestle with the question of what kind of school it wants to be, and how to preserve the intangible selling point often referred to as “identity.”

In a 2010 survey, parents made it abundantly clear, Mr. Dennis said, that a top priority was to avoid becoming another overly affluent pressure-cooker of a school, and to maintain a character that parents, students and administrators describe — often apologizing for the overuse of the word — as “nice.”

“They consistently expressed that they did not want Packer to give up its personal feel, to not be just another N.Y.C. school,” Mr. Dennis said.

Some parents even balked at the group of schools that Packer, which charged $31,555 tuition this year, was comparing itself to in survey materials — mostly elite Manhattan schools, rather than the smaller group of their Brooklyn peers, which includes Saint Ann’s, Brooklyn Friends and Berkeley Carroll.

Despite Packer’s stated desire to keep itself more brownstone than classic six, however, it possesses many of the attributes of a high-striving New York City private school.

For the past four years, over 50 percent of the incoming freshman class has come from Manhattan; this fall the figure will reach 70 percent. Packer’s high school “yield” — the percentage of accepted students who matriculate — is about the same as the Trinity School’s (50 percent, though more apply to Trinity, in Manhattan). Applications to the kindergarten have increased by 53 percent since 2006-7, and by 13 percent in the most recent year alone.

If sparkling new science studios add to Packer’s profile, Brooklyn’s gentrification has also played a role, as has Packer’s proximity to Lower Manhattan, where private schools are scarce and demand is great.

Photo

Packer Collegiate Institute was founded in 1845.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

When Mr. Dennis arrived at Packer eight years ago, the school raised about $880,000 a year. This year it is on track to raise $2.1 million, a record.

“Bruce has brought a lot of money into the school,” said Joanne Berg Alter, whose two children attended Packer for all 13 years. “I understand that people might not like that some of that money comes from Manhattan. But a school needs money to function.”

Packer was founded in 1845 as the Brooklyn Female Academy. It became the Packer Collegiate Institute after the school burned down in 1853 and a grant from Harriet Putnam Packer was used to rebuild it. In 1972 the school allowed boys to join the ranks.

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J. Geoffrey Pierson, who was the head of school immediately before Mr. Dennis, worked to improve its academic profile and entice more students to stay through high school, rather than leave for better-known schools after the eighth grade. When the board selected Mr. Dennis to succeed him, the choice was considered controversial: his background consisted of 35 years in public schools, including a stint as superintendent of schools in Bedford, N.Y.

In some respects, Mr. Dennis said, that experience made Packer look easy. “I’ve never had a parent here say ‘I pay your salary,’ ” he said. “I had parents say that to me all the time as superintendent.”

Since he took over, enrollment in the high school has grown by about 20 percent, to 338. With the new students came an army of new teachers and administrators. There are new heads of each division — lower, middle and upper — as well as a new athletic director, new science and math heads, and a larger lower school science department. There is also a new world language head and a new director of technology.

Students and alumni have taken note. “It wasn’t as competitive when I was there,” said Mila Mayer, a member of the class of 1991 who is now a freelance graphic designer and lives in Brooklyn. To survive, she said, “It needs to compete with some of the Manhattan schools, public and private.”

Like their peers at many of the city’s most competitive schools, parents, teachers and administrators at Packer are grappling with the stress of schoolwork, not to mention the college admissions process. This year, Alfie Kohn, the well-known education scholar who argues that homework does not make students smarter, visited Packer, adding fuel to a debate the school was having about students’ workload.

“Packer students do a lot of work, and it can be really stressful,” said Billy Dudine, a senior who has been at Packer for 13 years. Teachers were told they could amend their homework loads, and one upper school math teacher even stopped giving homework. “It really amped up the conversation,” he said.

The school has a complicated relationship with its current stature. For example, Mr. Dennis, two students and a parent all mentioned in interviews that Princeton had accepted six Packer students last year, a record for the school.

But no sooner had Mr. Dennis said that than he added that he did not place much stock in any given year’s college placement list. (“If we don’t get in this year are we any less good? No.”) Students were also quick to add that Packer emphasizes “fit” — finding the right college, and not necessarily the most prestigious one — unlike some of its Manhattan counterparts, they said.

It goes back to the “nice” thing, Mr. Dennis said by way of explanation. “I’m a public school guy,” he said. “But something special gets forged here; part of it is the school, part of it is the scope and scale. It’s smaller and deeper. It’s special.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2012, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: As Private School in Brooklyn Raises Its Profile, Questions of Identity Arise. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe